Far the largest category in the psalter are the ‘Individual Laments’, the psalms in which an individual Israelite—as opposed to the whole community—complains to Yahweh of some distress, and pleads to be rescued from it. In the very nature of the case the attitude here must be more self-conscious than in the hymns of praise. He who praises strives to lose himself in his awareness of Yahweh; he who supplicates strives to find himself in Yahweh’s awareness of him. Before it was a question of man reaching up to Yahweh; now it is a question of Yahweh bending down to man. Yet still the focus of attention is fundamentally the same. Still Yahweh is there among his people, united to each single member by the covenant-bond. Still the soul of the suppliant Israelite is dominated by the overwhelming consciousness of Yahweh listening, and Yahweh there.

What is in the mind of that suppliant, standing in the presence of his God, praying not quietly in his heart but at the top of his voice, with every resource of human eloquence, with wild gestures and with tears?

When in 1572 Thomas 4th Duke of Norfolk was attainted and beheaded on the charge of conspiring to marry Mary Queen of Scots and to dethrone Elizabeth, the Howard family lost the title of Duke for the best part of a century. His son however inherited through his mother, Mary Fitzalan, the title of Earl of Arundel, and this became the principal title of the family till the dukedom was restored in 1660. This son was Philip 23rd Earl of Arundel, who was still a minor when his father was executed. His father’s last act was to entrust him to the tender mercies of the great Lord Burghley, so that he was brought up a Protestant. But he married a good Catholic wife in the person of Anne, daughter of Thomas Lord Dacre, and Arundel House their London dwelling became one of the most noted citadels of the faith. Philip himself was converted in 1583 by William Weston, S.J., who was later Robert Nutter’s fellow-prisoner at Wisbech. Realizing that this step was high treason, Philip planned to flee to the Continent, leaving a letter for the Queen to be delivered only after his departure. But his flight was discovered before his ship left Portsmouth and he was arrested on board and lodged in the Tower. Four years later, when the Armada appeared in the Channel he was accused by a timorous priest, also a prisoner there, of procuring from the priest prisoners twenty-four hours non-stop intercession for the success of the Armada.

Many who are interested in the growth of an eirenic theology which aims at solving some of the contradictions and oppositions of divided Christendom will welcome a sermon under the above title, printed in the December number of Theology. Implicit in its argument is an intimation that the historico-critical method, though an indispensable instrument in the hands of the theologian to assist him in establishing the true sense of Scripture, has proved itself insufficient as the final and decisive criterion in biblical interpretation. Something further is required and that something would seem to be a deeper understanding of the meaning and function of Tradition.

Very briefly summarized, the argument of the sermon is that the Reformation produced a stalemate between Catholicism and Protestantism, both sides becoming involved in a closed-system theology. Up to the sixteenth century Catholicism had developed harmoniously, but in such a fashion as to interpret the New Testament in ways other than the New Testament itself really allowed. The Reformation broke this development by recourse to the Bible only. But Protestantism, almost at once, began the busy construction of closed doctrinal systems, unconsciously imitating Catholicism in positing a single canon of biblical interpretation; Lutheran justification by faith alone or Calvinist predestination of the elect. From the embattled state produced by these closed systems of theology, in which Catholicism and Protestantism had alike become involved, arose the historical method. In the hope of breaking the deadlock between them this method asked the question: ‘What does the Bible mean when considered in its own right, and without reference to any doctrinal system?’

Events at Nottingham and Notting Hill may well be symptoms of a more deep-seated and widespread evil in our midst. It is true that bullying Teddy-boys have been suitably punished, but it is also true, at the time of writing, that our popular press has printed letters which betray considerable race-feeling and racial prejudice. And anyway there is apparently conclusive evidence that the population of Britain falls into three broad groups of roughly equal size: one third is tolerant of coloured people, one third is mildly prejudiced, and one third is very prejudiced. These are saddening figures; and, alas, all the ugly incidents and ugly attitudes at Nottingham and Notting Hill do but confirm the accuracy of the estimate.

This is what obtains in twentieth-century Britain. In striking contrast, antiquity did not know of racial prejudice. The true Greek saw the world as something divided between Hellenes and Barbarians; another division would give the categories of citizen and slave. You were born, or became, a Roman citizen, without the slightest reference or advertence to skin pigmentation. Jews in the time of St Paul, whatever their exclusiveness and strong feedings about ‘gentiles’ or uncircumcised non-Jews, were quite unconscious of colour differences. We read in the Acts of the Apostles of an Ethiopian, a minister of Queen Candace of Ethiopia, who had gone to Jerusalem to worship (Acts viii, 27). He was no doubt a devout proselyte, and accepted like all others . . . ‘from every nation under heaven, Parthian, Medes, Elamites, inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judaea, Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia . . .’ (Acts ii, 8-10).

The coming of age of the layman in the present-day Church can be looked at, as a result of the general upheaval in modern society, from two inter-related points of view. In the first place, present circumstances have reminded us that the Church, even where she seems most settled and at peace, remains essentially ‘militant’: her children, while ‘in’ the world, are never ‘of’ the world. Constant conflict within and without is inescapable for all the baptized. Consequently the Church, impelled by the demands of her missionary task, is ever anxiously urging the layman to become the apostle and the Gospel-bearer that is at once his vocation and his birthright; while the layman himself, now finding himself up against unfavourable surroundings, whether antagonistic or indifferent, is more fully alive to the claims made upon him. For the most part he has not shrunk from this challenge, but rather shown his resolve to turn to greater account the immense riches of the Faith and the Church found in the Sacraments, the liturgy, the Bible, the great spiritual traditions and theology.

In the second place, there can be detected a tendency which would claim for the layman a more specific status in the mission of Christendom. According to this, the layman should assume as his peculiar right and duty those tasks of the temporal order which do not of their very nature belong to the spiritual society which is the Church; he should even willingly take over, within the Church itself, certain functions and responsibilities of which the clergy, to their own advantage, could be freed.

During recent decades the power and prestige of the trade union movement have been greatly increased. In the years between the two wars, the trade unions enjoyed full legal recognition, and even a privileged position at law. (They could induce workmen to break their contracts of employment, for example, without being liable to be sued for damages by the employers, and this meant that in no circumstances could the union be prevented from striking, however unreasonably, by any threat to its funds.) The achievement of full employment during and since the war has naturally increased their bargaining power. Many employers now welcome the co-operation of an organized body representing their workmen where previously they had only grudgingly accepted the existence of the trade unions. The consultations between the Government and trade unions on certain matters of economic policy have continued in the post-war period, though it would not be true to say that there has always been real co-operation.

Cardinal Ottavian, in an article that he wrote in the Osservatore Romano in 1951, pointed out that there has been a very great change in the way in which people regard the possibility of miracles today as compared with fifty years ago. Then, under the influence of Modernism and liberal criticism, the tendency was to reject as absurd an element of ‘wonder working’, or miracle from religion, and to regard any accounts of events purporting to be miraculous as suspect. Now, he observed, the climate of opinion has changed. There is a tendency to be interested in paranormal phenomena, and among certain people this interest has degenerated into an uncritical and irrational appetite for the marvellous in religion. It is very easy, when subjected to such influences, to become interested in the marvellous for its own sake and to regard the supernatural as only consisting in the wonderful and inexplicable. One becomes more interested in stories of miracles worked by saints than in the saints themselves, and the consequent dislocation of religious concentration can lead to outbursts of superstition.

When Father Joseph Jungmann, S.J., rose to speak at the great International Congress of Pastoral Liturgy at Assisi in September 1956 he was greeted by applause so loud and so long that even a cardinalatial chairman could scarcely bring it to an end. It was the spontaneous recognition, by two thousand delegates from all over the world, of the special place that Father Jungmann holds not only among liturgical scholars but among all who have worked for the liturgical revival of our time. His subject at Assisi was ‘Pastoral Care: The Key to Liturgical History’, and it summed up his own achievement, which has been to apply the resources of an exact and unflagging scholarship to liturgical history but always so as to preserve a lively sense of its true purpose. At Assisi he compared the Liturgy to a tree: ‘if it has developed in the changing climate of the world’s history, if it has known times of storm and times of fruitfulness, nevertheless its growth has come from within and from vital forces which it manifests. The Liturgy is the life of the Church in the sight of God, of the Church which is the community of all those who are incorporated in Christ by baptism and who, Sunday by Sunday, gather to celebrate, under the direction of the priestly ministry, the memorial of the Lord.’

A serious and sympathetic study of Newman’s theory of development has appeared recently from the pen of Mr Owen Chadwick. He concludes a painstaking historical account of theories on doctrinal development with a challenge to Newman’s claim to interpret Catholicism. ‘The question then for those who think Newman’s theology is Catholic, is this: these new doctrines, of which the Church had a feeling or inkling but of which she was not conscious—in what meaningful sense may it be asserted that these doctrines are not “new revelation”?’

That development for Newman was, in a certain sense, from an ‘idea’ held wordlessly and unreflexively to a formulation in words, I agree. But I am sorry that Mr Chadwick has used in this summary a word as un-Newmanic as ‘feeling’. I agree that Newman was a notoriously untechnical writer, and it is true that, in at least one place in his letters, he uses the word ‘feeling’ to represent what he elsewhere calls our partial or unconscious recognition of a truth which we have not yet learnt to formulate. But it is also true that, at other times, Newman explicitly rejects both ‘feeling’ and ‘experience’ as words too subjective to represent our relationship to the object of Christian faith or theology. Moreover, it is remarkable that, in his Sermon of 1843, on ‘Development in Religious Doctrine’, he never once uses either of these words. Nor does he, I believe, use them in the Essay on Development.

I have not visited Italy since 1956, so that these impressions of current journalism there are at a slight remove: but I have kept up with various periodicals printed in Italy through 1957 and into 1958. These are mostly Catholic—though very different in other respects—, my recent reading of non-Catholic Italian journalism being almost limited to the two chief ‘neutral’ newspapers of the North, the Corriere della Sera (Milan) and La Stampa (Turin), and to glances at the ‘highbrow’ anticlerical review II Ponte (Florence) and the equally anticlerical but far more widely sold II Mondo (Rome).

A word, to start with, on the post-war situation of Italian Catholicism. It seems an odd one, at first sight; powerful yet unstable. Politically, post-war Italy has been run by Catholics. The Resistance was, superficially at least, more Communist than Catholic, and until 1948 the situation seemed very dangerously fluid; but that year the Christian Democrats won their decisive victory at the polls, and they have stayed in power, though with reduced majorities, ever since; in the teeth of a fiercely sustained opposition from right, left and centre, not to speak of their own internal disagreements and such minor nuisances as the Montesi affair. Two chief factors—apart from the deep, if somewhat sluggish, attachment of most Italians to their Catholic heritage— have contributed to this real, if limited, Catholic predominance in Italian public life since the war: the high political intelligence and personal integrity of De Gasperi and the prestige of Pius XII.

There is still a tendency, which will probably persist as long as this planet remains inhabited, to belittle the miracles at Lourdes. This is exemplified by two fairly recent books. I want, in this article, to suggest that the attempts to explain away, as it were, the supernatural element in the recorded events, rests on the failure of those who try to do so to distinguish between what Catholics call proximate and ultimate causes.

Few modem writers who have taken the trouble to go into the medical aspects of Lourdes would deny that remarkable recoveries do occur there, and that, in the prevailing circumstances, the standards of medical detective work undertaken to exclude mistaken diagnosis, hysteria and fraud, are high. It is true that the great majority of officials and doctors who make up the three bodies which handle the evidence (the Medical Bureau at Lourdes, the Medical Commission, the Canonical Commission set up by the Bishop) are Catholics; but it is unlikely that these men, concerned with their own and their Church’s good name, would deliberately deceive both Catholics and non-Catholics so successfully for so long. I shall not here concern myself with the consideration of either the cruder explanations put forward to account for the cures at Lourdes, or with the history of Bernadette with the growth of the medical services which now supervise the investigation of alleged miraculous cures. These aspects of the shrine’s activities have been dealt with in many books, to which the reader is referred.

One of the effects of the restoration of the Holy Week liturgy and in particular of the Easter Vigil has been to re-direct attention to the Resurrection and its place in the Christian life. It is undoubtedly a new-found emphasis that does not chime very easily with the meditation-on-the-dolorous-passion mentality that has been the tradition since the later Middle Ages. The two are not of course incompatible and the Passion must always have a central place in the life of the Christian in via. But the liturgy does very definitely teach us that the climax of Christ’s redeeming work was not the Cross but the Resurrection and we are now faced with the task of re-incorporating it into our lives. For this at least two things are necessary: one is the rediscovery of what the New Testament has to say about the Resurrection and the other is to live it in and through the liturgy.

A word must be said about the New Testament material if only because it underlies the outlook of the liturgy. It may be divided for our purposes into three strata: the prophecies and accounts of the Resurrection in the Gospels, the earliest kerygma or proclamation of the Resurrection in Acts and the teaching of St Paul. We can do no more here than refer to the Gospel passages in which our Lord foretells his Passion and Resurrection, noting meanwhile that the Resurrection is always mentioned, and to the passages in Luke 24, 26, 27 which seem to have become already a ‘theological’ scheme: ‘Ought not Christ to have suffered these things and so enter into his glory?’ (and cf. verses 44-46).

Two groups of Christian scholars have met recently—one at Oxford, the other at Louvain—to consider the Gospel of St John; and the papers read at both meetings are now published. The English group was mostly Anglican, the Continental one (French, Belgian and Dutch, but using the French language) was Catholic; but this difference only appears obviously in two or three of the contributions to the English volume. Together these books are a striking witness to contemporary interest in the most sublime of Christian documents. This interest is particularly keen just now for several reasons including, besides a general stimulus coming from the Qumrân discoveries, the recent publication of an important new manuscript of the fourth Gospel and, in the field of Johannine theology, Dr C. H. Dodd’s great work, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (1953). It is in this theological field that the books we are reviewing make their chief contribution. The Catholic volume in particular offers some really distinguished pieces of biblical theology; indeed it is only fair to say, and one may say this without any parti pris, that of these two books the one that carries an imprimatur is by far the more important. The English work is relatively slight in scope and quality.

August, 1957: the great horse-shoe amphitheatre of the Sala Santitham, Bangkok—the last word in international conference halls—looked like a herbaceous border, so brilliant were the silks and saris of the women from fifteen Asian nations who had come to attend the Seminar organized by U.N.O. on the Civic Responsibilities and Increased Participation of Asian Women in Public Life.

Burma, Cambodia, China (or rather, Formosa), Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaya, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sarawak, Singapore and Thailand had all sent participants, for in all these countries women now have the vote, and politics and the professions are open to them. Fifteen nongovernmental organizations sent observers; they included the Associated Countrywomen of the World, the Young Women’s Christian Association, the World Association of Girl Guides, the World Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the International Union of Business and Professional Women, and four Catholic bodies: Pax Romana, the World Federation of Catholic Young Women and Girls, the World Union of Catholic Women’s Organisations, and the Catholic International Union for Social Service at whose behest I was there. And I think I was the only European present.

When I looked over my programme, I realized that U.N.O. had indeed gathered together some of the most able women in the East. India had sent a member of Parliament and of the Constituent Assembly, a quick-witted person, never at a loss for a word; Cambodia, a Professor of Primary Education, distinguished by the quiet chic of her national costume and her sound commonsense.